Properties

[Benji Smith]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "John Reimer" <terminal.node at gmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:28b70f8c119528cb42154f5d14e0 at news.digitalmars.com...
>> Hello Nick,
>>
>>> But, of course, adjectives (just like "direct/indirect objects") are
>>> themselves nouns.
>>>
>>
>> Umm... May I make a little correction here?
>> Adjectives are not nouns.  They are used to /describe/ nouns.
>>
>> -JJR
>>
> 
> Maybe there's examples I'm not thinking of, and I'm certainly no natural 
> language expert, but consider these:
> 
> "red"
> "ball"
> "red ball"
> 
> By themselves, "red" and "ball" are both nouns. Stick the noun "red" in 
> front of ball and "red" becomes an adjectve. (FWIW, 
> "dictionary.reference.com" lists "red" as both a noun and an adjective). The 
> only adjectives I can think of at the moment (in my admittedly quite tired 
> state) are words that are ordinarly nouns on their own.  I would think that 
> the distinguishing charactaristic of an adjective vs noun would be the 
> context in which it's used.
> 
> Maybe I am mixed up though, it's not really an area of expertise for me. 

Incidentally...

I used to do a lot of work in natural language processing, and our 
parsing heuristics were built to handle a lot of adjective/noun ambiguity.

For example, in the phrase "car dealership", the word "car" is an 
adjective that modifies "dealership".

For the most part, you can treat adjectives and nouns as being 
functionally identical, and the final word in a sequence of adjectives 
and nouns becomes the primary noun of the noun-phrase.

--benji